Ehud Barak and the Palestinian Track

Avi Shlaim

Published as ‘Avi Shlaim explains his disenchantment with Ehud Barak’, London Review of Books (25.1.2001)

The outbreak of the
al-Aqsa intifada, following Ariel Sharon’s provocative visit to
the holy Muslim shrine on 28 September 2000, reopened the question of
whether the Oslo accord is capable of producing a viable settlement of
the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. Ever since it was
signed on the White House lawn and sealed with the hesitant handshake
by Itzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat on 13 September 1993, the Oslo accord
has been a subject of controversy.

The 21 October 1993 issue
of the London Review of Books ran two articles about the Oslo accord,
one against and one in favour. Edward Said put the case against. First
of all, he insisted on calling the agreement by its real name:
“an instrument of Palestinian surrender, a Palestinian
Versailles”. He then proceeded to argue that, in signing the
agreement, Arafat cancelled the PLO Charter, set aside all relevant UN
resolutions except 242 and 338 which do not have in them a word about
the Palestinians, and compromised the fundamental national rights of
the Palestinian people. The document could not advance genuine
Palestinian self-determination, argued Said, because that means
freedom, sovereignty, and equality, rather than perpetual subservience
to Israel.

In my article I put the
case for the Oslo accord. It was obvious that the document fell a long
way short of the Palestinian aspiration to full independence and
statehood. The document was not presented as a full-blown peace treaty
but, much more modestly, as a Declaration of Principles for Palestinian
self-government, initially only in Gaza and Jericho. Despite all the
limitations and ambiguities, I argued, the accord represented a major
breakthrough in the long and bitter conflict over Palestine. The
important point was that the two parties recognised one another,
accepted the principle of partition, and agreed to proceed in stages
towards a final settlement. I believed that the accord would set in
motion a gradual but irreversible process of Israeli withdrawal from
the occupied territories and that it would lead, after the five-year
transition period, to an independent Palestinian state over most of the
West Bank and Gaza.

Over the last seven
years, my mind has often gone back to this early debate about the
nature and prospects of the Oslo accord. Who had the right reading,
Edward Said or I? Sometimes I felt that the argument was going my way;
at other times I thought that the argument was moving in
Edward’s way. It is probably too soon to pass a final verdict on
Oslo. When Chou En-lai was asked by a French journalist what was the
impact of the French Revolution, the cautious Chines leader replied
that it was too early to tell. The same might be said about the impact
of the Oslo accord. Edward Said called his most recent book The End of
the Peace Process. The judgement implied in this title strikes me as
premature. The process started at Oslo is still alive, if only just.
The argument I wish to advance here is that the peace process has
broken down not because the Oslo accord is inherently unworkable but
because Israel has reneged on its side of the bargain.

The Oslo accord did not
promise an independent Palestinian state at the end of the transition
period. It left all the options open. Similarly, nothing was said about
the issues at the heart of the dispute, such as Jerusalem, settlements,
borders, and refugees. All these issues were deferred for the final
status negotiations scheduled to take place in the last two years of
the transition period. The deal between Israel and the PLO was a gamble
and Itzhak Rabin knew this better than anyone else. His body language
at the signing ceremony revealed what he told his aides in so many
words: he had butterflies in his stomach. Yet the prospect of an
independent Palestinian state did not frighten Rabin. What mattered to
him most, even more than peace, was Israel’s security. Provided
Israel’s security was safeguarded, he was ready to go forward in
the peace partnership with his erstwhile enemy, as he did by concluding
the Oslo II agreement on 28 September 1995. But five weeks later he
fell victim to an assassin’s bullet. The Oslo process had
suffered its first serious setback.

The second major setback
was also connected with internal Israeli politics. This time it was
Binyamin Netanyahu’s victory against Shimon Peres in the
elections of May 1996. Netanyahu was a sworn enemy of the Oslo accord,
viewing it as incompatible either with Israel’s security or with
its historic right to the biblical homeland. But he knew that two
thirds of the Israeli public supported the Oslo accord and the policy
of controlled withdrawal from the occupied territories that it had set
in motion. Ever the opportunist, he began to trim his sails to the
prevailing wind of public opinion, promising to respect Israel’s
international obligations. Once elected, however, Netanyahu proceeded
in his maddeningly myopic and transparently dishonest way to evade
Israel’s obligations and to destroy the foundations that his
Labour predecessors had laid for peace with the Palestinians. He kept
talking about reciprocity while acting unilaterally in demolishing Arab
houses, opening a tunnel in the old city of Jerusalem, imposing
curfews, confiscating Arab land, and building new Jewish settlements on
the West Bank. Under intense American pressure, Netanyahu signed the
Wye River Memorandum in October 1998, promising to turn over another 11
per cent of the West Bank to the Palestinian Authority. But, true to
form, he reneged on this agreement. Ironically, it was not the
opposition that brought down his government but his own nationalist and
religious coalition partners who considered that he had gone soft on
the Palestinians and that he had compromised the integrity of the
historic homeland.

In the direct election of
the prime minister, held on 17 May 1999, Ehud Barak won 56 per cent of
the votes to Netanyahu’s 44 -- a landslide victory by Israeli
standards. Barak was given an unambiguous mandate for change, a mandate
to resume the struggle for comprehensive peace between Israel and its
neighbours. There was a strong sense that Barak was the right man at
the right place at the right time. I was one of those numerous Israelis
who pinned their hopes on the new leader. In the Epilogue to my book
The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World, I wrote that Barak’s
election was more than a political earthquake: “It was the
sunrise after the three dark and terrible years during which Israel had
been led by the unreconstructed proponents of the iron wall.” In
the LRB, on 16 September 1999, I went over the top again with an
article on “The Propitious Rise of Israel’s Little
Napoleon”. Mea maxima culpa.

What I failed to fathom
at the time was that General Barak was simply the latest proponent of
the strategy of the iron wall that had guided the Zionist movement from
the earliest stages of the struggle for Palestine. The crux of this
strategy -- promulgated in 1923 by Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the founder
of Revisionist Zionism -- was dealing with the Arabs from a position of
unassailable strength. But the strategy was also intended by its
architect to yield to a further stage where Israel would be secure
enough and strong enough to negotiate a satisfactory settlement with
the Palestinians and its other Arab neighbours. Menachem Begin, the
leader of the right-wing Likud and the disciple of Ze’ev
Jabotinsky, took the first step in the second stage by concluding a
peace treaty with Egypt in 1979. Itzhak Rabin, the leader of the Labour
Party, took the second and highly significant step by negotiating the
Oslo accord with the PLO in 1993. Binyamin Netanyahu took Israel back
to the first stage of the strategy of the iron wall, that of shunning
compromise and relying on force rather than on diplomacy in dealing
with the Arabs.

During the election
campaign Ehud Barak presented himself as the disciple of Itzhak Rabin,
as a soldier who later in life turned to peace-making. He also promised
to follow his slain mentor down the Oslo path. Most observers, myself
included, took him at his word. The real question was whether Barak,
Israel’s most decorated soldier, would be as successful at making
peace with the Arabs as he had been at killing them. His record
as prime minister shows clearly that he was not. While donning civilian
clothes, he remained essentially a soldier. Barak is what in Hebrew is
known as a bitkhonist -- a security-ist. As prime minister, no less
than as chief of staff, he had three priorities: security, security,
and security. All developments in the region, including the peace
process, are viewed by Barak from the narrow perspective of
Israel’s security needs and these needs are absurdly inflated,
not to say insatiable. And it is only a slight exaggeration to say that
Barak approaches diplomacy as if it were the extension of war by other
means.

The new prime
minister’s preoccupation with military power underlay his long
interview with Ha’aretz on 18 June 1999. He made a case for
trying to reach an agreement with Syria first on the grounds that Syria
was a serious military power whereas the Palestinians were not.
“The Palestinians are the source of legitimacy for the
continuation of the conflict,” he said, “but they are the
weakest of all our adversaries. As a military power they are
derisory.” So there we have it straight out of the horse’s
mouth: the Palestinians had no military power and posed no threat to
Israel’s security, so they could safely be relegated to the back
burner. What Barak implied, but did not say, was that a deal with Syria
would leave the Palestinians weak and isolated and therefore more
likely to accept whatever terms Israel eventually chose to offer them
for the final settlement. During the first eight months of his
premiership, Barak concentrated almost exclusively on the Syrian track
but his efforts ultimately ended in failure.

The Palestinian track,
however, could not be avoided altogether, not least because of the
written commitments entered into by Barak’s predecessors. His own
reservations regarding the Oslo accords and the Oslo process were a
widely known secret. As chief of staff in 1993 he was not informed
about the secret negotiations with the PLO in the Norwegian capital,
and he was highly critical of the accord that was reached there. In
1995 he was Minister of the Interior and he abstained in the cabinet
vote on Oslo II. His main objection to the Oslo process was that it put
the onus on Israel to divest itself in stages of its territorial assets
without producing a definitive resolution of the conflict with the
Palestinians. This was a curious objection because the principles of
land for peace and of gradualism lay at the very heart of Oslo process.
Interestingly, Barak’s first offer to Arafat was to skip the
small redeployments stipulated in the Wye River Memorandum and go for
the big bargain. But Arafat insisted that all previous commitments had
to be fulfilled before proceeding to the final status negotiations.

In the subsequent
negotiations Barak put intense pressure on the Palestinians. His
diplomatic method could be described as peace by ultimatum. The outcome
was an agreement signed at Sharm-el-Sheikh on 4 September 1999. The new
accord, dubbed Wye II, gave an extension of time to carry out the
redeployments agree to at Wye and put in place a wholly new timetable
for the final status talks. Israel and the Palestinian Authority agreed
to make a “determined effort” to reach a “framework
agreement” on the final status issues by February and a
fully-fledged peace treaty by September 2000. Like all previous
Israeli-Palestinian agreements, Wye II reflected the underlying balance
of power between the two parties. Israel’s strong bargaining
position was not only used to the hilt in negotiating successive
agreements but also in modifying them after they had been reached.
Binyamin Netanyahu had reservations about the Oslo accords, so he
refashioned them in his own image and the result was the Wye River
Memorandum. Ehud Barak had reservations about this Memorandum, so he
refashioned it in his own image and the result was Wye II. How did the
Palestinians figure in all this? The implicit answer is that beggars
cannot be choosers.

All the deadlines written
into the Sharm accord fell by the wayside. Barak seemed intent on
giving the illusion of progress while avoiding the substance. He
repeatedly stated that Israel will leave no stone unturned in striving
for a settlement. But his words sounded rather hollow against the
backdrop of persistent Israeli violations of the Oslo accords. The
third Wye redeployment was not implemented. Arab villages around
Jerusalem were not turned over to the Palestinian Authority as
previously promised. The safe passage between Gaza and the West Bank
was not opened. Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails were not
released. Worst of all, the old Zionist policy of creating facts on the
ground went forward at full tilt. More Arab land was confiscated on the
West Bank, new hilltop settlements were established, existing
settlements were expanded, and many more roads were built for the
exclusive use of the Jewish settlers. True, the Oslo accord did not
explicitly prohibit settlement activity. True, some settlement activity
had gone on under all three previous prime ministers. But under Barak
the building of settlements proceeded at a frenetic pace and in blatant
disregard for the spirit of Oslo. Barak seemed intent on repackaging
rather than ending the occupation and on tightening Israel’s
control over the Palestinian territories. The vision of coexistence
based on equality seemed utterly alien to his whole way of thinking.

One of the clearest
illustrations of Barak’s belief that he could impose his own
terms on the Palestinians was the summit held at Camp David in Maryland
in July 2000. The request for the summit came from Barak and Bill
Clinton, “the last Zionist” as one Israeli newspaper aptly
called him, obliged. At the summit Barak presented a package which
covered all the key final status issues, including a proposal for the
division of East Jerusalem. His spokesmen loudly and repeatedly
proclaimed that on Jerusalem he had gone further in meeting Palestinian
demands than any other Israeli prime minister. This was true but it did
not mean much since all previous prime ministers had dodged the
question of Jerusalem because it was too hot a political potato to
handle. All Israeli leaders since 1967, Labour as well as Likud,
routinely repeated the slogan that united Jerusalem is the eternal
capital of the State of Israel. What the official spokesmen omitted to
mention was that in return for the modest concessions on offer, their
leader insisted that the Palestinian Authority renounce any further
claim against the State of Israel, including the right of return of the
Palestinian refugees. Barak’s great mistake was to insist on an
unequivocal statement about the end of the conflict because even if
Arafat were to sign such a declaration, it would not have effectively
ended the conflict. Arafat was in fact under strong pressure from his
own people and from the leaders of some of the Arab states, notably
Egypt and Saudi Arabia, not to sign on the dotted line. He was reminded
that the entire Muslim world has a stake in Jerusalem, not just the
Palestinians. In the end, after two weeks of talks, Arafat rejected the
package and returned home to a hero’s welcome.

The collapse of the Camp
David summit fuelled Palestinian frustration and deepened the doubts
that Israel would ever voluntarily accept a settlement that involved
even a modicum of justice. The conviction gained hold that Israel only
understands the language of force. Ariel Sharon, the leader of the
Likud, went on a much-publicized visit of the Haram al-Sharif in the
old city of Jerusalem on 28 September and his visit detonated the
powder keg. Barak had personally approved the visit against the advice
of his security chiefs. Sharon himself claimed to be carrying a message
of peace but, if so, why did he need a thousand security men to
accompany him? Sharon is the most reviled man in the Arab world, and
his name is indelibly linked to the massacre of the Palestinian
refugees in the camps of Sabra and Shatila following the Israeli
invasion of Lebanon in 1982. His visit to the Muslim Noble Sanctuary
provoked very angry reactions which quickly snowballed into a
full-scale uprising -- the al-Aqsa intifada. The move from rocks to
rifles on the Palestinian side and the resort to snipers, tanks,
rockets, and attack helicopters on the Israeli side drove the death
toll inexorably upwards. In the first three months of almost daily
bloody clashes, 298 Palestinians, 13 Israeli Arabs, and 43 other
Israelis were killed. The peace process ground to a standstill and many
pronounced it dead.

The social and economic
cost of the intifada, as well as the cost in human lives, has been
staggering. The closure imposed by Israel on the territories is the
most severe since 1996. Israel closed the borders of the West Bank and
the Gaza Strip, consigning 2.3 million people to an open-air prison.
Some 110,000 Palestinians who work in Israel are idle.
Unemployment rose to 40 per cent as a result of the blockade. The
economic punishment meted out by the Israeli occupation forces has been
savage. Acres of Palestinian olive groves and farmland have been
bulldozed by the Israeli army. The Palestinian economy lost more than
£345million in the first 60 days of the crisis. Three years of
progress were wiped out in two months of conflict.

On the diplomatic front,
however, the conflict worked against Israel and in favour of the
Palestinians. The brutality with which Israel tried to put down the
popular uprising drew widespread condemnation. In the twilight of his
presidency, Bill Clinton launched a vigorous initiative to broker a
final peace deal between the two estranged parties. His peace plan
shifted significantly in favour of the Palestinians on Jerusalem,
borders, and refugees in comparison with the American “bridging
proposals” tabled at Camp David. The crux of Clinton’s plan
was that Israel would concede most of East Jerusalem (with the
exception of the Jewish Quarter in the old city and a corridor leading
to it), and in return the Palestinians would give up the UN-supported
right of return of the 3.7 million refugees. On top of that, the
Palestinians would get a state of their own on 95 per cent of the land
of the West Bank and the whole of the Gaza Strip.

Ehud Barak accepted
Clinton’s plan as a basis for negotiations, probably on the
assumption that Yasser Arafat would reject it and he himself would
score a propaganda victory. But Arafat confounded his calculations by
accepting the American plan, albeit in a heavily qualified fashion.
Electoral considerations also pushed Barak to change tack and to start
sounding much tougher and much more pessimistic about the prospects of
a US-brokered deal. An election of the prime minister will take place
on 6 February, and the opinion polls show that Barak is trailing behind
Ariel Sharon by as much as 20 points. While Sharon, the hardliner, is
trying to soften his image to woo votes from the centre, Barak adopted
hawkish rhetoric in the hope of recapturing the middle ground. He said
he would not go to Washington to discuss peace until the Palestinians
ended the violence. He also warned that the uprising could deteriorate
into a full-scale confrontation in the region and raised the prospect
of Israel annexing unilaterally large chunks of the West Bank. Once
again, as so often in the past, the peace process is held hostage to
the vagaries of the Israeli political system.

The Oslo accords did not
fail; it was Ehud Barak, following in the footsteps of his
undistinguished predecessor, who undermined them. The Oslo accords are
about identifying and cultivating common interests; Barak’s
behaviour all but destroyed the faith of the Palestinians in the
possibility of cooperation and coexistence with Israel. Itzhak Rabin
was in the construction business; Barak, despite the move he made from
the army into politics, appears to have stayed in the destruction
business. What is at stake in this conflict is not Israel’s
security, let alone its existence, but its 1967 colonial conquests.
Under the leadership of General Barak the Israeli army is waging a
colonial war against the Palestinian people. Like all colonial wars it
is savage, senseless, and directed in the main against the
long-suffering civilian population. Small wonder that a growing number
of IDF recruits and reservists are refusing to serve in the occupied
territories.

Palestinian
disenchantment with the so-called peace process is much more widespread
and it goes much deeper. When the Palestinians embarked on the Oslo
track they made a strategic choice: they assumed that they could
advance towards a state of their own only by diplomacy and not by
violence. Now they are not so sure. The al-Aqsa intifada seems to
demonstrate that to make any impression on the Israel of General Barak,
diplomacy must be backed by violence and the threat of violence. In
other words, they learnt from bitter experience that the only language
that Israel understands is the language of force. Ever since the first
Oslo accord was signed, Yasser Arafat has been calling for the peace of
the brave. Seven years on, he confronts an opponent who seems
determined to impose the peace of the bully. But, in the long run,
bullying cannot solve the Palestinian problem. The only sure way to end
the conflict is by ending the occupation. What is more, by ending the
occupation Israel would be doing itself a great favour. For, as Karl
Marx pointed out a long time ago, a nation that oppresses another
cannot itself remain free.